Singapore's privately held PhillipCapital Group said on Wednesday it has agreed to buy a majority stake in defunct broker MF Global's Indian unit, Reuters reported. PhillipCapital, which runs brokerage and asset management business across 13 countries, said it would plan to rename the business Phillip Securities India. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed and the transaction is still subject to regulatory approval. PhillipCapital said it will buy a majority stake in the joint venture between Sify Technologies and MF Global and has also agreed to buy the rest of the bankrupt U.S.

Myanmar's government is likely to allow foreign banks into the country by 2015 and to also give Myanmar's central bank more independence in setting rates, a senior official at Myanmar's biggest commercial bank said Friday, The Wall Street Journal reported. Myanmar's financial system remains primitive by international standards. The country only recently got its first ATMs, and credit cards aren't widely used.

A new wave of scandals involving Chinese companies listed overseas could hit New York and Hong Kong in the coming weeks as the annual results season get under way with auditors on high alert for fraud, the Financial Times reported. Auditors are under great pressure this year to detect discrepancies in their clients’ results, having faced embarrassment and legal action in 2011 following dozens of accounting scandals at Chinese companies listed in North America.

The economic slowdown weighing on both China and Europe may test Beijing's tolerance for a more flexible currency, thus creating competing policy interests for both regions, Dow Jones reported. Thursday's grim Chinese and euro-zone manufacturing data underscored how synchronized the world's largest economies have become. The 17-nation currency zone is widely expected to see a recession this year, which has bolstered forecasts for a weaker euro. Yet China has, at least for now, become the bigger worry.

The Chinese government has begun making it much easier for foreign investors to put money into China’s stock market and other financial investments, in a slight relaxing of more than a decade of tight capital controls, the International Herald Tribune reported. The move, not publicly announced but disclosed by some private money managers, indicates that Chinese officials are eager to counter a rising flight of capital from the country, a worsening slump in real estate prices, a weak stock market and at least a temporary trade deficit caused by a steep bill for oil imports.

Humpuss Sea Transport Pte Ltd., a Singapore-based unit of an Indonesian shipping company, filed for Chapter 15 bankruptcy protection in the U.S., Bloomberg reported. The unit of Jakarta-based PT Humpuss Intermoda Transportasi is already under the control of liquidators in Singapore, where it was incorporated in 1996, according to Monday’s filing in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan. Debt and assets were listed at more than $100 million.

Elpida Memory Inc., the last Japanese maker of computer-memory chips, sought protection from creditors in the U.S. as it pursues a bankruptcy case in Japan. The Tokyo-based chipmaker filed court papers today in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, Delaware, listing more than $1 billion in assets and debt. It asked the court to recognize the Japanese case as the main bankruptcy proceeding. Chapter 15 of the bankruptcy code allows foreign companies reorganizing abroad to protect their assets from creditors and lawsuits in the U.S.

Six out of 10 families in Seoul are indebted with the mountain of debt owed by households surpassing 200 trillion won (about $178 billion) last year, official figures showed Sunday, The Korea Times reported. According to the Seoul Development Institute (SDI), a think tank operated by the Seoul Metropolitan Government, the capital’s households owed more than 204 trillion won to financial companies as of last November, which represented an annual 4.8 percent rise. About 60.9 percent of the households were in debt at the end of December, up 0.8 percent from the third quarter.

More Asian governments are pressing businesses to hike wages as a way to prevent outbreaks of labor unrest, raising the specter of higher manufacturing costs for global companies—and the products they sell world-wide, The Wall Street Journal reported. In the latest move, Malaysia's cabinet has approved the country's first-ever minimum wage to be imposed soon, according to people familiar with the matter.

Units of Berlian Laju Tanker, Indonesia’s largest oil and gas shipping group, filed for Chapter 15 creditor protection in a US bankruptcy court early Wednesday morning, The Jakarta Globe reported on a Reuters story. The company’s units have listed assets and liabilities in the $50 million to $100 million range, according to a filing with the US bankruptcy court in the Southern District of New York. Under US bankruptcy laws, Chapter 15 grants a foreign company protection from creditors looking to seize its assets in the country.